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Wednesday, March 04, 2009

Sleeper Warfare

Another thirty minutes to tangle with the Sleepers, and some more thoughts and observations.

I warped in on another Fortification Frontier Stronghold and saw the expected two frigates (Emergent Defenders) and two cruisers (Awakened Defenders). As before, the frigates approached and orbited at about 7000 meters while the cruisers held off at 14-17 km. The frigs webbed me but no ships scrammed at any time.

The damage was considerable but tankable. I didn't run my LAR II and watched as my buffer depleted slowly.

Drones are a pain in the ass. I launched my flight of four remaining light drones and engaged one of the frigates. The Sleepers did switch targets to the drones but not until I had killed one of the frigates. I was too slow bringing them back in the excitement and lost another three. I then sent out medium drones and was far more careful protecting them.

As the enemy went down, I tractored the wreck to me and salvaged while engaging the next target. The second frigate may have tried to run away. I only say this because in the combat logs my Heavy Neutron Blaster IIs never hit the frigates, even when webbed, until after the first was gone and then I got a bunch of hits in a row. I suspect he was moving directly away from me and thus dropped the transversal in the process.

Click to see close up of enemy cruiser... bad angle, I know.The cruisers were engaged with medium drones anf my blasters after I MWD in range to web them. I had to keep bringing the drones in to protect them as the cruisers would target them one at a time. After the first cruiser went down however, the medium drones were too close to hit for the last cruiser and it was a simple matter to kill it.

As soon as the last cruiser went down, four more Awakened Defender cruisers spawned and I didn't warp out until I had salvaged the last cruiser wreck. Their DPS was beating my tank but slowly with the LAR II running. I don't know if I could take them in this ship, but a better tanked ship might be able to, or a ship with better DPS to kill them faster.

My thoughts on using the Dominix: damn, drone management is hard especially early on when all four Sleepers target the light drones. I wonder if a remote repper would allow the drones to tank the incoming damage, but right now I'm leaning towards using a ship with a non-directly-destructible weapon system.

The 3 Heavy Neutron II blasters I had installed were getting between 143 and 313 damage combined every 6 seconds against the cruisers, with most in the 200-270 range. Against the orbiting frigates they were useless. With a tracking of 0.05412 radians per second and an average radius of 7000 meters I can track 378m/s but I didn't observe the transversal of the webbed frigs so I can only assume it was higher than that. I'll make a note to observe that directly next time.

I'm torn between trying a more dedicated blaster boat like a Megathron or Hyperion and going shield tanking missile tosser, i.e. the Raven. I think I've learned all I can from this Dominix and will look for a way back to empire to try something else.

One further note: at one point I did send out 5 Vespa-600 ECM drones but they did not acheive any locks in the minute I had them out there. Sleepers do not appear to have and particiular vulnerability to ECM that players don't have.

Reasoning: hearding how well you did a duel LAR setup should do the trick against the bses. Use sentries to maintain safety instead of ogres. Web the frigs and close cruisers down and apply nos, remote rep the sentries since they are next to you and therefore no local rep necessary.

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